Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  FOLKLORE

  Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf, nineteenth-century engraving after a watercolor by Boris Zvorykin. THE ART

  ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTH?QUE DES ARTS D?CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI

  years later, however, Tsar Alexis (1645-1676), son of Peter the Great (1696-1725), ordered the massacre of practitioners of this and other secular arts. Royal edict notwithstanding, tellers of tales continued to bring pleasure to people, and on the rural estates of noblemen and in high social circles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Moscow, skillful narrators were well rewarded.

  The earliest collection of Russian folklore, consisting of some songs and tales, was made during the seventeenth century by two Oxford-educated Englishmen: Richard James, chaplain to an English diplomatic mission in Moscow (1619-1620), and Samuel Collins, physician to Tsar Alexei (during the 1660s).

  The first important collection of Russian folklore by Russians was that of folksongs from the Ural region, made during the middle of the eighteenth century and published early during the nineteenth century. At about the same time a real foundation was laid for folklore research and scholarship in Russia, due largely to the influence of Western romanticism and widespread increase in national self-awareness. This movement, represented in particular by German romantic philosophers and folklorists such as Johann Herder (1744-1803) and the brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785-1863; Wilhelm, 1786-1859), was mirrored in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century among the Slavophiles, a group of Russian intellectuals of the 1830s, who believed in Russia’s spiritual greatness and who showed an intense interest in Russia’s folklore, folk customs, and the role of the folk in the development of Russian culture. Folklore now began to be seriously collected, and among the significant works published were large collections of Russian proverbs by V. I. Dal (1801-1872) and Russian folktales by A. N. Afana-sev (1826-1871).

  But the latter part of the nineteenth century signaled the most significant event in Russian folklore scholarship, when P.N. Rybnikov (1831-1885) and A.F. Hilferding (Gilferding, 1831-1872) uncovered a treasury of folklore in the Lake Onega region of northwestern Russia during the 1860s and 1870s, including a flourishing tradition of oral epic songs, which up to that time was believed to be almost extinct as a living folklore form. This discovery led to a systematic search for folklore that is still being conducted during the early twenty-first century.

  During the Soviet period folklore was criticized for depicting the reality of the past and was even considered harmful to the people. Until the death of Stalin in 1953 folklore scholarship was under constant Party supervision and limited in scope, focusing on social problems and ideological matters. But folklore itself was recognized as a powerful means to promote patriotism and advance Communist ideas and ideals, and it became a potent instrument in the formation of Socialist culture. New Soviet versions of folklore were created and made public through a variety of media-concert hall, radio, film, television, and tapes and phonograph records. These new works included contemporary subject matter: for example, an airplane instead of the wooden eagle on whose back the hero often traveled, a rifle for slaying a modern dragon in military uniform, or marriage to the daughter of a factory manager rather than a princess.

  FOLKLORE

  Since the 1970s, Russian folklore has become free from government control, and the sphere of study has expanded. During the early twenty-first century, folklore of the far-flung regions of the former Soviet Union is being collected in the field. Many of the older, classic collections of Russian folklore are being republished, old cylinder recordings restored, and bibliographies published, mainly under the direction of the Folklore Committee of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in St. Petersburg and the Folklore Section of the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.

  Among the most important narrative folklore genres are Russian oral epic songs and folktales, which provide a rich diversity of thematic and story material. The oral epic songs are the major genre in verse. Many of them concern the adventures of heroes associated with Prince Vladimir’s court in Kiev in southern Russia; the action in a second group of epic songs occurs on the “open plain,” where Russians fight the Tatar invaders; and the events of a third group of songs take place near the medieval city of Novgorod in northern Russia. The stories are made up of themes of feasting, journeys, and combats; acts of insubordination and punishment; trials of skill in arms, sports, and horsemanship; and themes of courtship, marriage, infidelity, and reconciliation. Some popular songs are about the giant Svyatogor, the Old Cossack Ilya Muromets, the dragon-slayer Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich the priest’s son, and the rich merchant Sadko.

  The leading genre in prose, one that is well known beyond Russia, is the folktale, which includes tales of various kinds, such as animal and moral tales, as well as magic or so-called fairy tales, similar to the Western European fairy tales. Russian magic or fairy tales often tell a story about a hero who leaves home for some reason, must carry out one or several different tasks, encounters many obstacles along the way, accomplishes all of the tasks, and gains wealth or a fair maiden in the end. Among the popular heroes and villains of Russian folktales are Ivan the King’s son, the witch Baba Yaga, Ivan the fool, the immortal Kashchey, Grandfather Frost, and the Firebird. See also: FIREBIRD; FOLK MUSIC; PUSHKIN HOUSE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Afanasev, Alexander. (1975). Russian Fairy Tales. New York: Random House. Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana. (1998). Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Ivanits, Linda J. (1989). Russian Folk Beliefs. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Oinas, Felix J. (1985). Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Oinas, Felix J., and Soudakoff, Stephen, eds. (1975). The Study of Russian Folklore. The Hague: Mouton. Sokolov, Y.M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit, MI: Folklore Associates.

  PATRICIA ARANT

  FOLK MUSIC

  Russian folk music is the indigenous vocal (accompanied and unaccompanied) and instrumental music of the Russian peasantry, consisting of songs and dances for work, entertainment, and religious and ritual occasions. Its origins lie in customary practice; until the industrial era it was an oral tradition, performed and learned without written notation. Common instruments include the domra (three- or four-stringed round-bodied lute), balalaika (three-stringed triangular-bodied lute), gusli (psaltery), bayan (accordion), svirel (pennywhistle), and zhaleyka (hornpipe). Russian folk music includes songs marking seasonal and ritual events, and music for figure or circle dances (korovody) and the faster chastye or plyasovye dances. A related form, chastushki (bright tunes accompanying humorous or satirical four-line verses), gained rural and urban popularity during the late nineteenth century. The sung epic bylina declined during the nineteenth century, but protyazhnye-protracted lyric songs, slow in tempo and frequently sorrowful in content and tone-remain popular. Significant stylistic and repertoire differences exist among various regions of Russia.

  Russian educated society’s interest in folk music began during the late eighteenth century. Numerous collections of Russian folk songs were published over the next two centuries (notably N. L. Lvov and J. B. Pr?c, Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes, St. Petersburg, 1790). From the nineteenth century onward, Russian composers used these as an important source of musical maFOLKLORE

  Russian peasants playing folk music, early-twentieth-century postcard. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTH?QUE DES ARTS D?CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI native folk music in the face of increasing urbanization. In 1896 Vasily Andreyev (1861-1918) organized an orchestra of folk instruments, and in 1911 Mitrofan Piatnitsky (1864-1927) founded a Russian folk choir. Originally consisting of peasant and amateur performers, both became well-known professional ensembles, providing folk music as entertainment for urban audiences.

  During the Soviet era folk music h
ad important symbolic importance as a form genuinely “of the people.” During the 1930s, state support for socialist realism encouraged study and performance of folk music. Composers and amateur performers developed a new “Soviet folk song” that wedded traditional forms and styles with lyrics praising socialism and the Soviet state. Official support was demonstrated in the establishment of the Pyatnit-sky choir and the Russian folk orchestra directed by Nikolai Osipov (1901-1945) as State ensembles. Russian folk music became a state-sanctioned performance genre characterized by organized amateur activities, notated music, academic study, and large professional performing ensembles that toured internationally. During the 1970s, Dmitry Pokrovsky (d. 1996) began a new effort to collect and perform Russian folk songs and tunes in authentic peasant village style, with local variations. This revival of Russian folk music received international attention as part of the world music movement. See also: BALALAIKA; FOLKLORE; GLINKA, MIKHAIL; MUSIC; RIMSKY-KORSAKOV, NIKOLAI ANDREYEVICH terial. During the nineteenth century, German philosopher Johann Herder’s ideas of romantic nationalism and the importance of the folk in determining national culture inspired interest in and appreciation of native Russian musical sources, especially as they reflected notions of national pride. Mikhail Glinka, for his purposeful use of Russian folk themes in his 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, is considered the founder of the “national” school of Russian music composition, most famously embraced by Mili Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, C?sar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This designation had more political than musical significance, as composers not associated with the national school, such as Peter Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky, also made use of folk music in their compositions.

  Russian ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made efforts to record

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. (1983). “Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music.” In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore in the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Rothstein, Robert A. (1994). “Death of the Folk Song?” In Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  SUSANNAH LOCKWOOD SMITH

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  FONVIZIN, DENIS IVANOVICH

  FONDODERZHATELI

  Literal translation: “fund holders.”

  In the Soviet economy, various organizations were holders and managers of inputs (fondo-derzhateli). The principal fund holders were ministries and regional and local governments. In some instances, the state executive committees that directed construction organizations and local industry had fund-holding authority as well. Only fund holders were legally entitled to allocate funded resources, the most important of which were allocated by the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and the State Committee for Material Technical Supply (Gossnab). Fund holders had to estimate input needs and their distribution among subordinate enterprises. They were obliged to allocate funds among direct consumers, such as enterprises, plants, and construction organizations within their jurisdiction. Fund holders also monitored the use of allocated funds. Funding (fondirovanie) was the typical form of centralized distribution of resources for important and highly “deficit” products. Such centrally allocated materials were called “funded” (fondiruyumye) commodities and were typically distributed among the enterprises by ministries. Enterprises were not allowed to exchange funded inputs legally. Material balances and distribution plans among fund holders were developed by Gosplan and then approved by the Council of Ministries. The ministries had their own supply departments that worked with central supply organizations. The enterprises related input requirements to their superiors through orders (za-yavki), which were aggregated by the fund holder. At each stage of economic planning, requested inputs were compared to estimated input needs, and imbalances were corrected administratively without the use of prices. The process of allocating funded resources was characterized by constant bargaining between fund holders and consumers, where the latter were required to “defend” their needs. See also: FUNDED COMMODITIES

  PAUL R. GREGORY

  FONVIZIN, DENIS IVANOVICH

  (1744-1792), dramatist.

  Denis Fonvizin, the first truly original Russian dramatist in the eighteenth century, is best known for two satirical plays written in prose: The Brigadier-General (Brigadir) and The Minor (Nedorosl). Brigadir, written in 1766, was not published until 1786. Ne-dorosl was first staged in 1783 and published the following year. Both are considered masterpieces combining Russian and French comedy.

  Like all writers at the time, Fonvizin was born into a well-to-do family. His father, a strict disciplinarian, trained him to become a real “gentleman,” and became the model for one of the characters- the father of Mr. Oldwise (Starodum)-in Fonvizin’s play The Minor. Although thoroughly Russianized, the family’s ancestor was a German or Swedish prisoner captured in the Livonian campaigns of Ivan the Terrible. At Moscow University Fonvizin participated actively in theatrical productions. Upon graduation in 1762 (when Catherine II became empress), Fonvizin entered the civil service. In St. Petersburg, he befriended Ivan Dmitrievsky, a prominent actor, and began to translate and adapt foreign plays for him. He wrote minor works, such as Alzire, or the Americans (1762) and Korion (1764), but tasted his first real success when Catherine summoned him to the Hermitage to read his comedy The Brigadier to her. In 1769 she then appointed him secretary to Vice-Chancellor Nikita Panin, Catherine’s top diplomatic advisor.

  Although faithful to the French genre in writing The Brigadier, Fonvizin was less inspired by Moli?re than by the Danish playwright Barin Lud-vig Holberg, from whose play Jean de France Fon-vizin’s play was derived. A salon comedy, The Brigadier attacks the nobility’s corruption and ignorance. After reading the play, Panin wrote to Fonvizin: “I see that you know our customs well, because the wife of your general is completely familiar to us. No one among us can deny having a grandmother or an aunt of the sort. You have written our first comedy of manners.” The play also mocks the Russian gentry’s “gallomania”; without French rules for behavior “we wouldn’t know how to dance, how to enter a room, how to bow, how to perfume ourselves, how to put a hat on, and, when excited, how to express our passions and the state of our heart.”

  In 1782 Fonvizin finished The Minor. Since it was unthinkable that these lines could be read aloud to Catherine, he arranged a performance at Kniper’s Theater in St. Petersburg with Dmitrievsky as the character, Mr. Oldwise. The audience, recognizing the play as original and uniquely Russian, signaled its appreciation by flinging purses onto the stage. The play condemns domestic tyranny and false

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  FOOD

  education, while touching also on larger social questions, such as serfdom. The play concerns the stupid son in a noble family, the Prostakovs (a play on the word prostoi or “simple”), who refuses to study properly but still expects to receive privileges. The lad’s name-Mitrofan (or Mitrofanushka in the diminutive)-is now a synonym in Russia for a dolt or fool. The composition of the family is telling. The mother, a bully, is obsessed with her son (that he get enough to eat and marry an heiress). Her brother resembles a pig more than a man (as his name, Skotina, suggests). Her husband acts sheepishly; the nurse spoils the boy; and the boy-wildly selfish and stupid-beats her. The play’s basic action revolves around the conflict between the Prostakovs on the one hand and Starodum and his associates on the other. The formers’ “coarse bestiality” (as Gogol termed it) contrasts sharply with the lofty morality that Starodum and his friends exhibit.

  In 1782 Fonvizin’s boss, Count Panin, had a stroke and summoned Fonvizin to write his Political Testament. He ins
tructed the dramatist to deliver the testament, containing a blunt denunciation of absolute power, to Catherine after Panin’s death. However, when Panin died the next year, Catherine impounded all his papers (not to be released from archives until 1905) and dismissed Fon-vizin. Pushkin later wrote that Catherine probably feared him. The playwright’s health declined after a seizure in 1785, and he died in 1792. See also: THEATER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fonvizin, Denis Ivanovich, and Gleason, Walter J. (1985). The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Levitt, Marcus C. (1995). Early Modern Russian Writers: Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Detroit: Gale Research. Moser, Charles A. (1979). Denis Fonvizin. Boston: Twayne. Raeff, Marc, ed. (1966). Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology. New York: Harcourt, Brace amp; World.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  FOOD

  Russian food is typically hearty in taste, with mustard, horseradish, and dill among the predominant condiments. The cuisine is distinguished by the many fermented and preserved foods necessitated by the short growing season of the Russian North. Foraged foods, especially mushrooms, are important to Russian diet and culture. The Russians excel in the preparation of a wide range of fresh and cultured dairy products; honey is the traditional sweetener.

  Russian cuisine is known for its extensive repertoire of soups and pies. The national soup (shchi) is made from cabbage, either salted or fresh. Soup is traditionally served at the midday meal, accompanied by an assortment of small pies, croutons, or dumplings. The pies are filled with myriad combinations of meat, fish, or vegetables, and are prepared in all shapes and sizes. The Russian diet tends to be high in carbohydrates, with a vast array of breads, notably dark sour rye, and grains, especially buckwheat.